by disquietin'goose

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Eddie knew the corners of Boston and all the shortcuts. It was Eddie who had shown me the knife shop and Raymond’s and the joke shop; my father had shown me the memorial to the black regiment and Hooker’s statue and the Union Oyster House. Between my father and Eddie, Boston held no secrets for me.

It was all exteriors, though. I never went inside anywhere. What would be the point? I had no money, and I was afraid of being confronted. But Eddie had been to all the stores, and had even gone inside the Old Howard for a burlesque show and told me the jokes. A stripper said to a heckler, “Meet me in my dressing room. If I’m late, start without me,” which made Eddie laugh so hard he didn’t notice that I hadn’t understood.

Secondly, however, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, codified the precept that no legal subject could be imprisoned with out due process of law. It specified that “whoever has the body” must, on being presented with a writ of Habeas Corpus, produce “the body” before a judge in a court of law. By legally stipulating the body in lieu of the person — i.e., literally as the place of the person—the Act specified the body as the natural ground for claiming legal rights, a ground that still supports most personal rights claims. Thus, both Hobbes and Habeas Corpus offered “natural” grounds for opposing the monarch’s claims to divine right by locating the nature of the legal and political person in “the body,” which henceforth provided — and continues to provide — the basis for being an individual. At the end of the 17th century to be an individual, legally and politically (if not yet biologically), came to mean, “to have a body.”

(…) While “power”will become one of Foucault’s most famous concepts, at this point he evokes it as a type of “permanent civil war,” thereby distinguishing his analysis from Marxism’s “class struggle”: “[C]ivil war inhabits, traverses, animates, invests all parts of power. […] The daily exercise of power must be able to be considered as a civil war: to exercise power is in a certain way to conduct a civil war, and all of its instruments, its tactics that one can situate, its alliances, must be analyzable in terms of civil war.”

Ms. Hulsers favorite painting by John Sloan is Stealing the Wash, and it is also in the show. Mr. Sloan moved to New York from Philadelphia in 1904 and used binoculars to gain a better view of New Yorkers lives atop the tenements. The painting shows an older man stealing woolen socks from a clothesline. Mr. Sloan wrote that as he watched, the thief tried on all the woolen socks before stowing them in his neat bundle and climbing down the fire escape.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.